GEPIS--quantitative gene expression profiling in normal and cancer tissues.

Area of Science:

• Bioinformatics
• Genomics
• Molecular Biology

Background:

• Understanding gene function and identifying therapeutic targets requires expression profiling across diverse tissues.
• Expressed sequence tags (ESTs) and their associated tissue information offer a valuable resource for gene expression studies.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop a computational tool for analyzing gene expression patterns using ESTs.
• To facilitate the identification of genes with specific expression profiles in normal and tumor samples.

Main Methods:

• Development of Gene Expression Profiling in Silico (GEPIS), a tool integrating EST and tissue source data.
• Computation of gene expression patterns across a large panel of normal and tumor samples.
• Creation of the GEPIS Regional Atlas for visualizing gene expression in genomic regions.

Main Results:

• GEPIS successfully computed gene expression patterns, showing consistency with existing literature and experimental data.
• The GEPIS Regional Atlas provides visualization of gene expression characteristics within selected genomic regions.
• The program demonstrated utility in large-scale screening for tissue- and tumor-specific genes.

Conclusions:

• GEPIS is an effective in silico tool for analyzing gene expression patterns from EST data.
• The tool aids in discovering genes with specific expression profiles, valuable for functional genomics and therapeutic target identification.
• GEPIS facilitates large-scale mining for tissue- and tumor-specific genes.